Bernurd Marchnd

A Dialectical Approach in Geography

Formal logic, whose goal is to insure coherence between statements, is but

one, very restricted, f m of logic. Dialectical logic, dealing with qualitative
statements and change, has a very large field of application in geography.
Modern industrial society tends to turn its back on dialectics by refusing to
consider necessary, self-induced change. Such blindness is a result of some key
notions: the myth of equilibrium, the reliance on linear mathematics, and
one-dimensional thought. Dialectics is reappearing in questions geographers
frequently ignore. The appearance of dialectics in social sciences is anticipated
by modern mathematical developments: fuzzy set theory, catastrophe theory,
and the growing use of topology.

During the 196Os, geography in English-speaking countries enjoyed an excep-

tional period of development and enthusiasm: new ideas were welcome, and
sometimes avidly sought. Then, the middle class in Western Europe and North
America became frightened by its own boldness and, moved by changes in the
economy, contradicted itself and looked back with nostalgia to the 1950s. A
new generation of graduate students started rejecting mathematical methods
and, in strong defiance of what it called “reason,” advocated personal contacts,
“empathy,” and socially “relevant” issues. A “radical geography,” often
strongly colored by Christian ideology, appeared at the antipode-r so it
seemed-of mathematical modeling, It is almost as if a pendulum were end-
lessly moving from technology to mysticism and back, with little hope of
breaking the vicious circle.
There is a way out of this sterile dilemma, but it is carefully barred by the
prevalent ideology: it would consist of replacing the present dichotomous
opposition of the extremes with a dialectical opposition leading necessarily to
synthesis. To show this is the purpose of this paper.
A characteristic of North American social sciences is an extreme disdain for
philosophy, and particularly for modern philosophy. This is in marked con-
tradistinction to continental Europe. In most North American bookstores,
fundamental texts are few, and they are often shelved away under the title
“Philosophy, Religion, and Occultism”: Hegel and Sartre are lumped together
with Gurdieff, St. John of the Cross, and Black Magic. Geographers quoting
Bernurd Marchand is visiting associate profasor, University of Toronto.

0016-73f33/78/0278-0105$00.50/0 0 1978 Ohio State University Press

GEOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS, vol. X, no. 2 (April 1978)
Submitted 6/77. Accepted 9/77.
106 / Geographical Analysis

philosophers usually stop at Kant, who characteristically represents the En-

lightenment at its peak. The cataclysm of Hegel’s work, closing an era and
building the foundations of modem thought (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche), is not
even discussed, but conveniently ignored. Most of the texts that have been
important and controversial for the past 150 years simply represent an enor-
mous blind spot.
There is, even among scholars, an extreme defiance of intelligence and the
act of reflection: students keep opposing the “real world,” somewhere “out
there,” the source of all truth and all reality, to their thoughts, the constructions
of their minds, whose only role, it seems, is to reproduce clumsily the external
world. The sole merit of a model is to fit the data closely in a self-defeating
effort to copy the “real world”; but what would be the use of a model fitting
perfectly? Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the fit is “always bad, because the
real world is too complex for human thought to grasp it.” In this way,
geography seems condemned to a dumb contemplation of the Creation, or to a
futile effort to imitate an un-imitable world. The dichotomous opposition
between subject and object is total and leads to a dead end.
Although undialectical in its form, this paper is XI effort to introduce
dialectics, to show how present society tries to refuse dialectics, but how, in
doing so, it cannot but help the reemergence of dialectical thought.

1. DIALECTICAL REASON

The basis of dialectics is the discovery that to negate is a positive act, the
only one fitted to the nature of human thought and the nature of things (which
are finite and self-contradictory).
The foundation of Hegel’s thought and of all modem philosophy is time, i.e.,
change. Everything is in perpetual transition into something else: it is still itself
(or we could not identify it anymore), but it becomes, at the same time, other. It
contains in itself something different from itself, its own contradistinction. A
thing A becomes (or negates itself into) Not-a; then Not-A negates itself in turn
into Not-(Not A), but this is not returning back to the starting point: the thing is
realizing itself through such successive transformations. It accumulates a his-
tory, an experience: time is not reversible. This is in complete contradiction to
mathematical logic (or “formal,” or “common” logic), which is circular: A is
equivalent to Not-(Not A). Mathematical logic is a logic of quantity: the nature
of the variables is fixed; then quantities are compared in turn along a one-di-
mensional axis with only two directions, plus and minus. Contradiction is
represented by inverting a relation: A becomes - A . Through a second inver-
sion, - A becomes A again. Conversely, Hegel’s logic deals with qualities. He
understands “truth,” for instance, as in the expression “a true friend.” We know
what a true friend should be; John Doe might, through successive experiences,
prove himself to be a “a true friend.”

The Nature of Dialectics

The finitude of things. Dialectics is not just a convenient method that we
may fit to observations, as one may choose between a linear or nonlinear model.
 Bernard Marchund / 107

It stems from the nature of things: first, because they are in time, and
perpetually changing; second, because they are qualitatively finite. The modem
city can be defined only by reference to other kinds of landscapes; the concept
includes in itself what it is not. Hegel prefigures here one of the basic concepts
of topology: the definition of a closed set that contains its own boundary.
The intellect. Everything we know is known through thought, for even a raw
sensation is an element of thought. How does the intellect work? I observe a
city existing, say London (existence or being), but I also have a universal idea of
the City (notion), of which London is only a particular realization. Which, the
particular or the universal, is the foundation of my thought? This question is
one of the most important problems in philosophy. It came to a crossroad in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For British empiricism (Hume, Locke),
the particular comes first. Man accumulates observations (sense-perceptions),
then generalizes. The idea is similar to an arithmetic mean, and, not surpris-
ingly, classical (frequentist) statistics developed in England. Our thoughts are
the reflection of the present state of the world.
“It is not reason, which is the guide of life, but custom” [8, p. 161. The state
of the world we observe is necessarily good, since there is no criterion against
which to compare and judge. This philosophy, developing with the industrial
revolution, is basically conservative and pessimistic: “If experience and custom
were to be the sole source of [man’s] knowledge and belief, how could he act in
accordance with ideas and principles as yet not accepted and established?
Truth could not oppose the given order or reason speak against it. The result
was not only skepticism, but conformism. The empiricist restriction of human
nature to knowledge of the given removed the desire both to transcend the
given and to despair about it” [ 12, p. 201.
German idealism (Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, and particularly Hegel), took an
opposite stance: sense-perception is characterized by multiplicity (of impres-
sions), finitude, and change. What defines thought is the unification of sensa-
tions by the unique ego: the thinking I builds the universal from the variety of
sense-perceptions, and generates the “notion.” When Locke said “There is
nothing in the intellect which was not before in the sensation,” Leibniz added
“but the intellect itself,” i.e., its unifylng and structuring ability. German
idealism preserves human freedom: there is a criterion now (the notion), by
which to judge the world. If the present state of things (existence) does not
correspond to the notion, then, let us change it.
In a pragmatic society, such controversy is viewed as a senseless waste of
time, but it actually has the most important consequences: “Hegel’s concept of
reason has a distinctly critical and polemic character. It is opposed to all ready
acceptance of the given state of affairs” [12, p. 111.
The fundumentul dialectical relations. Notion versus existence: The notion of
man includes the idea of freedom; his existence, however, might be slavery.
Such a discrepancy between notion (or essence) and existence (or being) is, for
Hegel, the source of all energy moving the world. Through successive con-
tradictions the existence will tend toward the essence.
Subject versus object: Pragmatic “common sense” conceives the relation
between subject and object in a most childish way. The subject of knowledge
appears like a man looking from an ivory tower with binoculars, down to the
108 / Geographical Analysis

“real world” and writing down “objectively” what he sees, or like a scientist in
a submarine, observing through the window different fishes passing by undis-
turbed. No philosopher, not even an empiricist, has ever proposed such an
oversimplified conception. Since any form of knowledge is in the mind, the
reality of the object would dsappear if subject and object were so radically
separated. Everything would be completely subjective, and such a “realistic”
position would turn dialectically into total idealism.
The object in geography is represented through data that are chosen,
collected, and sorted by society for the geographer. For instance, census
categories of employment were chosen deliberately in the United States at the
turn of the century in order to make apparent social ascension in a society that
was to give everybody his chance to climb to the top.’ Conversely, many
European censuses report social groups largely according to the control they
have on the means of production, in a typical Marxist perspective. To exhibit
social progress-whatever this means-is not easy with European data, but to
perform a Marxist analysis of the U.S. labor force is practically impossible. The
object of knowledge is shaped, screened, and censored by society. When
geographers, using factor analysis of some kind, analyze the same censuses and
discard factors with small eigenvalues, they recover not the structure of the
“real world’-whatever this may mean-but the census structure. IS it SO
surprising that most American cities present similar factorial structures?
In any case, the data are multiple, separated, and contingent. Reason then
steps in, as the unifying activity of the self, and generates the notion, i.e., a
universal. In this way, the object is largely a construction of the subject, which
does not imply at all any reliance on a kind of subjective hallucination, but only
that the subject is present at the core of the object.
The dialectical relation between the two is still more subtle. Anything that
exists, undergoes perpetual change but maintains its identity at the same time.
From this viewpoint, any real object is a center of actions and reactions, and is
a suhect, although not necessarily a conscious one. Within a city, a neighbor-
hood that retains its originality in spite of changes is a subject, inasmuch as it
possesses certain mechanisms that allow it to resist the effect of changes in
accessibility, land rent, land use, and so forth. It possesses inner rules of change
(e.g., ethnic cohesion, sociological traits, zoning laws, local amenities, and so
on), which explain how it can undergo changes and remain itself at the same
time.
In the same way, if a social group behaves as a subject (as it does so often),
reacting as a whole to some situations, and skillfully protecting its own interests,
it is not necessary to assume a conscious plot between its members, as some
geographers want us to believe [ 5 ] .By the inner logic of the social system,
social groups are made up of their actions. At the same time, and dialectically,
such groups are objects, since they are formed by the grouping of individuals
and subjects who are able to react and behave in self-defense. There is no need
to assume in every case either some immense conspiracy or some Machiavellian
mind pulling the puppets’ strings behind the scene. Reality is generally less

‘W. C. Hunt’s analyses were used as a counter to Marx, a point kindly indicated to me by John
Adams, University of Minnesota.
 Bernard Marchund / 109
romantic, less simple, and more frightening: men are caught in their own webs
out of which they cannot break anymore.
The definition of an object involves much more than a simple list of
properties, which are static; it must explain its inner rules of change. “The
definition must express. . . the movement in which a being maintains its
identity through the negation of its conditions. In short, a real definition cannot
be given in one isolated proposition, but must elaborate the real history of the
object, for its history alone explains its reality” [ 12, p. 721.
Any prevalent social ideology sorts our data and our concepts. To call them
objective, i.e., unbiased and true, is to accept blindly the view society wants to
give of itself. Facts are incomplete, thus abstract, because they negate all other
potentialities. A student asked to enumerate the data he should gather to study
transportation in an American city explained that he would not consider bicycle
traffic at all because it is presently negligible, which is true and false at the
same time, for the potentialities of the bicycle in urban traffic (or of any other
mode not presently used) are negated (on the other hand, consider the examples
of Amsterdam or Copenhagen). “Dialectical thought. . . undermines the
sinister confidence in the power and language of facts. . . . This power of facts
is an oppressive power” [ 12, pp. ix, xiv].

Dialectics in Geography
Losch regional model as a dialectical process. The most important and most
overlooked conclusion of central place theory is Lijsch’s demonstration that a
perfectly homogeneous landscape with identical customers, working inside the
framework of perfect competition, would necessarily develop, from its inner
rules of change, into a heterogeneous landscape with both rich, active sectors
and poor, depressed regions. The homogeneous regional system negates itself
and generates dialectically its contradiction, as regional inequalities appear.
Until Liisch, geographers explained such heterogeneity by physical factors (soils,
climate, etc.) or external human factors (emigration of labor, presence of rich
families, and so on). Losch has shown that, even if such physical disparities did
not exist (but only those assumptions of a uniform plain, similar customers, etc.,
that have been so criticized and so misunderstood), the inner dialectical logic of
the system would turn it, from the inside, into its very contrary.
Actually, Lijsch follows Hegel very closely. In The Philosophy of Nature,
Hegel shows that the primary determination of nature is space, characterized
by the property of self-externality. Space is first that which is external to itself
(like the open set that does not contain its boundary). Such an indeterminate
space negates itself into that which is contained in itself: the paint. The point is
“the negation of space. . . which is posited within space” [6, vol. 1, p. 2231.
The point negates itself in turn into something that is still self-contained, but
other than the point, i.e., the line: the line “passes over into the plane” and so
on.
The whole set of geometric figures is built by a necessary inner mechanism of
self-negation. In the same way, Lijsch posits the settlements, which generate
necessarily the transport lines between them, and then the regions. As Curry
pointed out, the very appearance of settlements negates the homogeneity of the
110 / Geographical Analysis

plain, and the development of transport axes its isotropy. In fact, the Liisch
regional model is directly inspired from Hegelian “mathematical mechanics,”
which should not be too surprising.
In Hegel, the whole set of geometric figures contradicts itself into a synthesis
that will still be spatially self-contained,but other, i.e., into time, that is change.
Through change in time, the point can become other, while remaining somehow
the same. The regional system becomes dynamic, not by a contingent decision
to add a time variable, but because the contradictions between poor and rich
sectors necessarily set the stage for conflicts.
The dialectics of center-periphery. In Roman antiquity, the economy was
based on agricultural production: the Latin word for money comes from the
word for cattle (pecus). Roman civilization then developed as an urban
civilization: its expression was the city, with its typical center, the forum (from
“for, fan”: to talk), where people met and discussed matters. The empire
developed as an immense hierarchy of cities dominated by The City, Roma,
which was adored as a goddess. But the cities were sucking the energies of the
countryside-products, capital, and men-particularly through the encroach-
ment of big landlords on small parcels, and the consecutive enslavement of
small farmers ruined by debts. The very development of this urban civilization
produced its collapse.
The dialectical contradiction between city and farm leads to a synthesis: the
Merovingian and Carolingian villa, a big farm surrounded by crops and
pastures. At the same time, it had urban functions: production, with craftsmen
working on leather, brass, textiles; a political role (the owner was a lord, with
his tribunal and his clientele); and religious functions (a chapel, and, later, a
school).
In a further dialectical step, this complex form exploded into two opposed
and dialectical components: the fortress and the village. Their relation was a
simplified form of the master-slave dialectic.
This antithetic contradlction led in turn to a new synthetic form: the
medieval city, opposed both to the village, because it had fiscal autonomy and
political power, and to the fortress, because its inhabitants were commoners. It
was a production center, negating the pair because it represented commerce
and the beginning of industrial production, a new form of economics.
Such an illustration of geographic dialectical processes is clearly oversim-
plified. A detailed analysis of the underlying economic mechanisms and a finer
description of the intermediary contradictions would be most enlightening, but
it has been done much more extensively elsewhere. In a similar way, it is possi-
ble to develop a dialectical analysis of the inside-outside relationship.’ Private
property generates the fear of trespassing and the concept of “defensive space,”
that is, of collective organization; hence the appearance of spatial forms (family
lot, neighborhood, nation), which are private for the outside but collective for
the inside. Private appropriation of space generates spatial segregation and
negates itself in protective collective organization. Private property culminates
in nationalism, and destroys itself in what is collectively needed for the

’This idea has been developed by D. C. Evans, of the University of British Columbia, in a yet
unpublished paper.
 Bernard Marchund / 111

protection of the nation, namely, the central government, a defense budget, and
a tax system on property.

The Dialectics of Nature in North America

The attitude towards nature is a fascinating reflection of deep dialectical
relationships at the economic and social level. At the end of the nineteenth
century, the concept of the free market had not yet become a myth. There was
still perfect competition between independent producers. Darwin painted
nature as the stage for a fierce competition between living beings. Realizing the
survival of the fittest, natural processes were seen as cruel, pitiless, but healthy
and necessary--precisely the image that the economic system wanted to give of
itself.
By the 1930s and 1940s, cartels and corporations had largely smoothed
competition. After the troubles of the Depression, the accent was on organiza-
tion and order: with general obedience, prosperity is round the c m r . Nature,
as seen through Walt Disney’s cartoons, was a sugar-coated paradise: in Snow
White, there is actual division of labor among the animals cleaning the dwarfs’
house; everybody is in his place (indicated by racial characteristics), and
everybody loves it. In the 1950s, when Disney productions released their
famous wildlife documentaries (for example, The Living Desert), the myth
exploded on the screen. These were real pictures and not man-made cartoons;
the image showed the real animal life in an impressive sequence of fear, hunger,
violence, and killing, while the spoken commentary praised the goodness of
God and the admirable order of nature. The dialectic between image and words
exposed the myth as never before.
Relation to nature changed again with the recent ecological movement. At a
time when giant corporations begin to be feared, when big business starts
appearing as a menace, people try to relate back to the last reserve of freedom,
back to nature’s “true competition.” This latest step in the dialectical evolution
of the concept of nature is not a return to the Darwinist conception, for there is
much less fear of nature’s cruelty, and much more longing for something people
know unconsciously they have lost. Sometimes the myth blows up, and instead
of the healthy competition so naively expected, the civilized person finds the
true violence of misery, as in the movie Deliverance, where the false contradic-
tion between the artificial urban life and the healthy fight against nature is
brutally changed into what it has always been, the social dialectic between the
city professional and the miserable Appalachian farmer.
City and country are dialectically related. North American civilization has
always been urban, from the start, even when it attempted agricultural ven-
tures. Hence the hate for the city and the desperate longing for the country.
But nature is nothing, in this case, but the negation of the city; that is, it is a
place where people try to go on holidays (which are just a necessary part of the
production process), or of which they may dream on the TV screen in the city.
Distance as a dialectical relation. Until the end of the eighteenth century,
social separation in Europe was based on privileges and titles. Space played
hardly any role. The different orders lived in the same places, often in the same
building with a weak vertical separation: the rich bourgeois had his shop on the
112 / Geographical Analysis

ground floor, his apartment on the second or the third; wealth and power
decreased as one walked up the stairs, with the servants’ rooms under the roof.
Next door could be the palace of a powerful prince who, if in need of money,
would rent a part of his palace to commoners (as the Regent of France did, in
the eighteenth century, at the Palais Royal). Political bodies such as the
Parliament assembled the subjects, the lords, and the sovereign under the same
roof-often in the same room, The king’s gardens were frequently crowded
with the populace [ 91.
As the bourgeoisie triumphed, orders and privileges were abolished and social
groups began to segregate, as if geographical distances took the place of social
ones. Traditional groups (nuclear and extended families, productive groups,
feudal corporations, religious groups, etc.) began to lose their importance, and
man became increasingly isolated as an individual. Today, man is neither a
group member, nor yet an autonomous being, but partially and painfully
detached from the group.
Commuting may appear as a way of negating simultaneously the home and
the working place. It gives a man the opportunity of preserving his indepen-
dence from his colleagues at work, and from his family at home, without
breaking completely from either of them. Daily migration might be made partly
for its own sake. In this hypothesis, the middle-class would not choose suburban
locations and then find itself forced to commute. On the contrary, it would
choose commuting as a way of preserving one’s individuality. This would
explain why so many housewives in the suburbs around Paris, where they have
every shop at hand, take their cars so often and drive downtown into the
polluted traffic jams. Psychologists speak in such cases of the need for change.
More deeply, the immersion in the downtown crowd decreases a person’s
isolation and increases her loneliness: it is a way of mixing with a group but
remaining an individual. Loneliness in the crowd is a dialectical spatial process.
The geography of tourism would also be illuminated by such a dialectical
view of space. The strong development of camping and trailers illustrates the
dialectical need for both leaving and staying at the same time. The desire for
feeling uprooted would not be satisfied by an authentic immersion into true
wilderness, nor by staying at home. Modern man needs to park his trailer in a
forest and to look at the bears from his living room. National parks in the
United States simultaneously tend to preserve wilderness and to make it
domesticated. Organized hikes with a ranger enumerating the Latin names of
the flowers show how an exotic environment is dialectically presented as a
foreign wilderness and at the same time dominated in a reassuring classification.
The tourist flying to Calcutta or Bogota wishes to stay at a Hilton as similar
as possible to his home in order to feel the contradiction completely. It appears
between the lounge and the street: he has only to push the door open, or look
through its glass panels, to feel uprooted. The feeling of the contradiction
would fade away if he were to live a few weeks in a local posada with
Colombians because this would be discovering a new environment, and not just
tourism anymore. Young tourists illustrate such a phenomenon. They often
travel alone, going very far in search of new societies, but they gather together
quickly as soon as they have the opportunity, to reconstruct their home, in this
way restoring the contradiction.
 Bernard Marchand / 113

Man can be separated from something by spatial distance (D) or by its

strangeness, its exoticism (E): home and office are not very different from each
other but separated commonly by miles (E is small, D large). In the case of the
American tourist in Colombia, the exoticism of a Bogoti street appears strong
to one standing in a Hilton lounge (E is quite large, while D is small).
Conversely, a Hilton is similar to an American home, but located thousands of
miles away.
The events on the screen of a drive-in-movie are ordinarily so different from
the family environment that home can be reconstructed in the car itself. The
most extreme case is presented by TV. The television shows can be so exotic
that they are allowed to take place inside the home: President Nixon’s visit to
China is viewed from the bed itself. If our model is appropriate, we may infer
that TV would not have its place at home if it did not present very exotic
shows. It is not located inside the family circle because it is a source of
“familiar” information, but because it presents the most unfamiliar events
domesticated and digested to fit the social system of values.
There seems to be an inverse relationship between exoticism and “distance,”
perhaps something like:

E.D = Constant.
A more detailed analysis would show dialectical relations between the
locations of home, work, and pleasure. Fishing is a hobby largely because it is
practiced far away from home. A few exceptional cases illustrate how inner
contradictions are shifted to other relations but do not vanish. A circus, for
example, is one of the very few places where home, work, and hobby coincide.
Such a group, however, is extremely mobile and moves over large distances.
The movement appears to compensate for such a coincidence of functions and
( E - D )is still a constant. If the circus settles down permanently in a place, the
artists disperse their homes to various locations, and the exceptional coinci-
dence disappears.
The counterculture communes are another example of such coincidence. The
concentration of work, residence, and pleasure at the same location is even one
of the explicit goals of a community. But such groups tend to be very elastic,
with members entering the group or leaving it in a much more mobile way than
a middle-class family. Indeed, a basic feature of many communes is their desire
to retire from the establishment world altogether, to pull out as far as possible.

2. MODERN INDUSTRIAL.SOCIETY: THE NEGATION OF DIALECTICS

Modem industrial society, probably more strongly than any other past
society, has strong built-in mechanisms whose role is to conserve it. It con-
tradictorily aims toward quantitative development, while avoiding qualitative
change. In Europe, North America, and still more so in the Soviet Union, social
organization is presented as a nature (unique and necessary), rather than a
culture (which would be characteristic of one location, at one point in time, but
subject to change). Dialectical reason, whose role is to understand and to orient
change, cannot be but anathema to such societies. Contradictions exist among
114 / Geographical Analysis

phenomena: this cannot be helped, but a whole set of efforts try to freeze them
into sterile dichotomous oppositions, which avoid the clash between thesis and
antithesis to create a third term, the synthesis.

The Reign of Dichotomy: The Either/& Dilemma

In the Classical Age (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), the concept
of reason changed its meaning and its scope. Enlightenment consisted essen-
tially of a radical shrinking of reason [2]. Whereas in the past it designated the
faculty of attaining truth, it later became restricted to a pragmatic meaning: the
ways and means to dominate nature, and, by the same token, man. “Technology
is the essence of this knowledge. . . . What men want to learn from nature is
how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. . . . . Power and
knowledge are synonymous. For Bacon as for Luther, ‘knowledge that tendeth
but to satisfaction is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit
or generation.’”

In antiquity, and even in the Middle Ages, imagnation, art, and exoticism
were constituents of reason: in the Classical Age they were virtually eliminated,
a development coinciding in society with the elimination of anybody who did
not fit usefully into the rational system of bourgeois production. Foucault
analyzes in detail “le Grand Renfermement” (the great incarceration) of the
Classical Age, when the madman, the libertine, the visionary, the poet, and the
rebel who roamed the roads quite freely in the Middle Ages were jailed
indiscriminately with the thief, because they were equally dangerous for the
new order. As reason shrank to technology, its past components were relegated
to mysticism, forming two poles of the new consciousness; poles not dialecti-
cally conceived, but radically separated and opposed in a frozen dichotomy.
From a social viewpoint, Christian ideology is also founded on the dichoto-
mous separation between this world, where the oppressed may hope, but must
be patient and obedient (the “Jenseits” of Goethe), and the other world, where
liberation will happen (the “Diesseits”). It developed as a religion of slaves and
soon became a state religion, satisfying simultaneously the oppressed and the
power to be. The opposition must remain dichotomous and frozen: if it were to
emerge into a synthesis, it would explode in revolution. Many heretics tried it,
but they have been carefully crushed throughout history.
The result is that social thought swings endlessly, like a pendulum, between
the technological pole (“a new electronic streetcar will solve urban problems”)
and the mystical one (“love and prayer will resolve social conflicts”). The
pendulum’s movements seem to be a function of the GNPs rate of growth. In
the last twenty years, geography has experienced particularly strongly such
blind rushes from one hope to the other; presently it seems to be slowly leaving
the mystical pole, and, with a typical hangover, moving toward some new
technology. Dichotomous thought leaves no exit, as in Sartre’s play: the hero,
exhausted by sterile discussion, opens the door, but afraid of the unknown,
comes back into his self-accepted jail and concludes, “Let us start all over
again.”
 Bernard Marchund / 115

Towards the Elimination of Dialectical Thought

Unconscious efforts to eliminate dialectical reason from geography are many:
Eliminating thought altogether. The myth of “the real world out there” is
working in this particular direction. To many-perhaps particularly to students
-models seem to have no merit other than to reproduce the data. Some
students-and the best ones-wonder why build a model at all?
Fear of intelligence (the sin of pride), has a similar effect: the present
disinterest in university education is partly the product of such attitudes.
Defusing contradictions: the concept of equilibrium. Contradictions exist;
there is no point in denying them, but they can be conveniently frozen in a
dichotomous relation through the concept of equilibrium. This concept,
borrowed from mechanics, assumes that all acting forces are qualitatively
equivalent, and not self-contradictory; thus, they can be shown to cancel each
other. From the mesh of intricate oppositions emerges not qualitative change,
but a “dynamic” immobility. The market concept as a stage of conflicting
forces leading to a unique equilibrium price is fundamental. Regional econom-
ics is largely geared toward proving the existence of regional or even general
equilibriums.
Eliminating dialectical relations through mathematics. The forms of mathe-
matics used in the social sciences, and particularly in geography, contain, and
have built in them, the very negation of any dialectical process:
Optimizing methods assume continuous functions, whose derivatives are
defined, and convex sets, which cannot produce conflicting solutions.
Linear models, the bulk of our mathematical models, are particularly
characteristic: (1)they assume inner homothetic properties ( a - f (x) =f(ax)),
whereas dialectics show that a change in quantity induces a change in
quality: homothety is bounded. (2) The choice or origin is arbitrary
(f (x - a )=f (x) -f (a)). Processes are supposed to be stationary, and the
position in time is indifferent. (3) Complexity may be broken down into a
sum of independent components. Most sophisticated methods of analysis
rely on a form of spectral decomposition: factor analysis (X,=Ziai,fi) or
Fourier analysis. Relationships may be severed, without altering the ob-
served phenomena, if decomposition is practiced along the natural cleav-
age lines (i.e., along the eigenvectors).
Spaces are always assumed to be “metric”, i.e., full and continuous. They
do not contain any inherent “holes” or discontinuities.
Severing the relationships. The opposite of dialectical thought is to conceive
the objects of knowledge as positive, closed, and self-sufficient entities. Extreme
specialization of scholars is an excellent way of avoiding a dialectical approach.
Another is to insist on monographies: one will study Appalachia without
considering its dialectical relationships with the megalopolis, another will study
Bolivia as a closed set, neglecting its dependence on Europe and the United
States.
Economists, in particular, tend to consider time as an independent variable
that could be isolated (e.g., through principal component analysis and rotation),
while other variables would remain intact. Phenomena are not conceived as
116 / Geographical Analysis

existing only in an endless qualitative change, but as immobile, frozen entities

in which time is not an intrinsic constituent. Psychologists feel more uneasy
about partialing out change; Catell sees the difficulty and discusses it [ 4 , p. 117
et seq.].
These problems are duplicated in everyday behavior; social tension is com-
monly avoided (but reinforced) through spatial separation: defensive space is a
way of avoiding dialectical human relations.
Projecting complex phenomena onto one unique axis. Differences in quality
(and therefore dialectics), vanish when the scientist reduces everything to
measurements in only one unit: the concept of exchange value, the basis of
present economy, is doing exactly that. Such a view of a “one-dimensional
man” leads us to conceive a linear evolution of societies: they all follow the
same path, only with different speeds. All cities will, sooner or later, emulate
Los Angeles. Thus, geography negates itself into an oversimplified kind of
history [ l o ] .

3. NEGATING THE NEGATION: THE RESURGENCE OF DIALECTICS

All these unconscious efforts to defuse contradictions and conserve the

prevailing order cannot, of course, alter the dialectical nature of processes, but
can only displace the contradictions; they reappear elsewhere, still more
obvious.

The Inner Contradictions of Dichotomous Thinking

Since reason does not play a critical role, but is restricted to pragmatic
efficiency, the modern social sciences keep proposing models that are increas-
ingly efficient in an increasingly absurd context. Urban transportation is a good
example: linear programming, or other powerful methods, help in the designing
of transportation systems with minimum costs, but nobody seems to wonder at
the increasing separation of home from working place. The intrinsic absurdity
of living at ten, twenty, or thirty miles from the office, of commuting twice this
distance daily, of choosing a home in a “green” suburb that one never enjoys,
leaving it in the early morning, and driving back to it at night, is never
discussed. Such a pattern is typically taken for granted, simply as a “fact,” and
reason steps in only to rationalize the parts of an irrational system. The same
could be said of office concentration downtown. There are, of course, good
socioeconomic reasons to explain such patterns, but they are very rarely called
upon.
In the Venezuelan oil fields, increasing productivity creates few, but highly
paid, jobs. The privileged workers are surrounded by a large number of
semiparasites, with very low productivity (service workers, domestics, pros-
titutes, etc.), sharing the high salaries indirectly. High productivity is dialecti-
cally negated into high parasitism, which is necessary, and actually useful, in a
society with low skilled manpower and high unemployment: productivity is
rationally increased, but no rational criticism is made of the concept of
productivity in such a context. Rational efficiency does not destroy dialectical
contradictions, but pushes them away onto another level-where they are
 Bernard Marchund / 117

conveniently left out of the study. Increasing rational efficiency in the parts
dialectically generates increasing absurdity in the whole. There was once in a
psychiatric hospital a schizophrenic girl who believed she was a piece of butter;
she explained she had to stay carefully away from heaters lest she would melt,
thus being extremely rational in a totally absurd context. Geographers would
help her by assuming a distance decay function for heat (probably a negative
exponential one?), and by computing the best location in the room, but one
wonders if this would be the best way to help.
The swing of the pendulum between technology and mysticism produces
fascinating-and frightening-effects. The textbook controversy in the United
States is one of them [13]. A strong, sometimes violent movement, refusing to
allow Darwinism to be taught at school because it seems to contradict the
Bible’s teachings, has reappeared recently in the United States. It cannot be
easily dismissed as absurd and typical of illiterate peoples: “Most textbook
controversies issue not from rural folk in Appalachia but from middle-class
citizens, many of whom are technically trained. . . . Their answer to the
uncertainties of a technological society was not to reject technology but to
return to fundamentalist religion and traditional beliefs.” and: “The change [in
the late 1960~1became evident in the growing criticism of scientific rationality
and in the proliferation of cults and sects based on Eastern mysticism” [13, pp.
33-34]. The dichotomous opposition between reason, reduced to operational
technology, and mysticism, severed from any sensual basis and from reason,
cannot pass over into any synthesis; according to the Frankfurt School, it can
only lead into barbarism and fascism [ 71.

The Crowing Negation of Dichotomous Thought

In such a pragmatist environment, dialectical reason still reappears, although
mutilated and in a clumsy way.
Negating empirical attitude. Pure empirical research, piling up “facts” and
sticking to them, has been strongly negated by the development of mathemati-
cal modeling in the social sciences and geography. Models are based on facts,
and try to fit them, but they negate them in trymg to exhibit universal laws.
Another typical phenomenon is the development of Bayesian statistics,
particularly since 1954 [ 151. Exhibiting many weaknesses of the “frequentist”
approach, Bayesians compound empirical evidence with a priori probabilities.
This may be far away from the Hegelian notion, but represents a characteristic
departure from the empiricist credo.
Negating the either/or dichotomy. Such a dichotomy forms the basis of set
theory. Consider a large set U with a subset X. Every u, element of X, is
defined by a “characteristic function” c sending every element of the set U into
a small binary set:

c : { V}+{0,1}.

Each element of U is or is not a member of X according to its image: it is in X if

its image is 1, in the complement of X if it is 0. Membership is an either/or
operation. Although it forms the basis of all mathematics, in many cases it is not
118 / Geographical Analysis

subtle enough. A generahzation has been developed in electrical engineering at

Berkeley, by Zadeh: fuzzy set theoy. The image of the characteristic function
is not a binary set anymore, but a larger one, with three, four, or many points.
There are now points of U that are “a bit” in X , but not totally. In this still very
rigid way, an inner contradiction appears in some points x which are, and at the
same time are not in X . This is not yet dialectics, but a considerable step toward
it. Some geographers have insisted on the usefulness of fuzzy set theory in
geography [ 3 , 141.
Negating continuity. Topology itself, which developed at the turn of the
century, is essentially a study of discontinuity. A very general discipline, such as
point-set topology, has been used principally by mathematicians to study
functions, particularly continuity in integration. However, it could lead to more
general uses in the social sciences. A new, quite revolutionary theory based on
topology has just been proposed: catastrophe theory, developed by Rene Thom
during the past few years [16, 171. Once again, the method still lacks the
subtlety of dialectics and, like most mathematical methods, produces descrip-
tive measurements and imitative models, rather than intrinsic explanation. It
shows, however, an increasing consciousness of what are actually dialectical
processes.

4. CONCLUSION

This paper has tried to attack and weaken three myths that appear to be
lamentably strong in present geography:
The myth of trivial empiricism (actually a childish misunderstanding of
Hume’s philosophy), which bows to the tyrannical power of “facts” and
accepts blindly the status quo.
The related myth of immediacy which radically separates subject and
object (in knowledge and in action), and negates the power of thought by
restricting its role to that of a simple, faithful mirroring of “the external
world.”
The myth of positivism, which believes hypocritically in an “objective,”
i.e., unbiased, science, which could find truth independently of any ideo-
logical framework.
Every society (and, according to the ethnopsychiatrists, this industrial society
more than any other one), generates smoke screens concealing its actual
mechanisms, painted veils that are self-justifymg propaganda. To accept the
myths indicated above is to gobble with a blind eagerness such propaganda, and
thus negate the real role of the scientist dedicated to look, behind the veils, for
the actual laws of motion, the real cogs and wheels. In a very dialectical
fashion, positivist science turns into a mythical science, and the facts it deems
concrete are actually abstractions.
Of course, this does not imply at all any absurd condemnation of mathemati-
cal methods. Mathematics are a unique and indispensable approach to describe
quantity. They are necessarily and dialectically related to dialectics, which
erplains qualitative changes. Only a dichotomous view, opposing mysticism to
technology, would like to do without mathematics.
 Bernard Marchand / 119

Hegel’s thought, as presented here, should itself be negated and modernized.

Marx did it by switching from idealism to materialism, but dialectical thinking
is not necessarily Marxism. In the present dichotomous environment, there
exists in North America a mythical fascination, and a pathological repulsion,
toward Marxism: the us/them dichotomy leads many to believe that anybody
using dialectics must be “one of them,” whatever that means. However, there is
another important system of thought stemming from dialectics: the Freudian
approach. The ego is a living synthesis of the contradictions between conflicting
id and superego. Human behavior appears as a dialectical synthesis between
individual libido and social constraints: ethnopsychiatry has opened a way that
should be most fruitful for geographers and urbanists [ 1 1.
One of the merits of the Frankfurt School is to have tried, in a very Hegelian
way, to relate dialectically the findings of Marx with the findings of Freud [ I I ] .
It may be time, today, to negate the Frankfurt School and to forge further
ahead.

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